The Lightning Field by Heather Jessup

All stories are about redemption. This is my new theory based on the books I've been reading for this project (the blog, that is). This novel has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it phoenix leitmotif, including a protagonist who is quite literally struck by lightning and rises harder and (arguably?) stronger from the ashes. It is masterfully crafted.

For the first part of the book I was worried that it would be another second-wave-style exploration of white housewives' boredom in the suburbs post-war, much like The Torontonians. I honestly don't think I can stomach another such story - not because it's not a valid thing to write about, just because it doesn't interest me personally and I feel so removed from that narrative. But two things made The Lightning Field different: the housewife, Lucy, is struck by lightning while pregnant with her youngest child; and her husband, Peter, works as an engineer/draftsman on the Avro Arrow, the groundbreaking and famously doomed Canadian aeronautics project, cancelled by Diefenbaker's Conservative government in 1959.

I didn't know much about the Arrow and the novel definitely paints a clear picture of the impact of the layoffs of over 14,000 people working on the project, including many top scientists and engineers who were quickly recruited by American companies - instant brain drain! The loss of his job changes Peter, just as the lightning strike changes Lucy, and the novel watches those changes ripple through the lives of their friends and children.

Guys, this book is gorgeous. It is SO beautifully written, the characters are well-drawn and very sympathetic - even Peter, who is kind of an asshole. It is a complex snapshot of a certain time in Toronto's history, and of coming of age in that time. Jessup creates a world that has many unseen but intriguing components; I would read a novel about what happens to Lucy's estranged best friend Claire in those missing years, or about the lives of any of Lucy's children. The author avoids one of the common pitfalls of first novels - putting everything you know into it - and manages to create curious little pockets of unseen action. She also creates sneaky metaphors that catch you by surprise; my breath literally caught in my throat reading the conversation between Lucy and her co-survivors of lightning strikes at a conference, as they explain to her that she is lucky to have scars because people will believe what happened to her. (It's about rape, right? Yeah, I got it). Or flight - Peter's work of course, and his first flight as his daughter is born, and how the boys' dreams for themselves are so closely tied to flight.

There are so many excellent themes touched on: death of course; redemption; love; fate; all the big ones. I loved the dinner scene near the end, with the children huddled under the table passing around a bottle of wine. I loved Lucy, with all her flaws and her strength and how completely she encompasses the feeling of being an adult and not knowing what the hell you're supposed to do. She is one of my favourite characters that I've read about for this project.

I cry at everything that's meant to make me cry, it's true; but it takes a gifted writer to make me cry about weird shit like the Avro Arrow getting cancelled. Heather Jessup is a gifted writer, and definitely someone I will read again.

Five CN Towers out of five.

Adultery by Richard B. Wright

I have to be honest - when I picked up this book, I thought it might finally be the one to get a really shitty review. I have liked a large majority of the books I've read for this blog, which works out well for me, but it makes me worry that I don't come across as a very discerning reader. So when I saw the front cover of this one - with its lurid title in big block letters across a picture of a woman in the back seat of a car, head thrown back in ecstasy - I thought, yeah, this is the trash I'm looking for.

But it didn't turn out that way, because to my utter surprise, this is a smart, well-written and...almost lovely novel. It purports to be about adultery but I think it is more general in its themes, honestly. I think it is about death, and family, and in particular about, in the words of the book itself:

"[...T]he sheer cussedness of life: its enslavement to appetite and old bad habits, its helpless reliance on chance, its thousand natural shocks that threaten to undo us."

Sounds depressing, right? Admittedly it's not a happy story. Our protagonist, Dan Fielding, is on business in London and slips down to Devon for the weekend with a much younger co-worker, Denise, with whom he is engaged in a two-day-old affair. She is abducted, raped and killed (in the first chapter, no spoiler alert needed) and the rest of the story follows Dan home to Toronto as he deals with the aftermath of his choices and of the random twist of fate that revealed them. It's an odd situation: his family is guarded in their anger over the affair because of the death and media circus; the grieving family and friends of the victim don't know how to handle this older man who brought her (accidentally) to her death. It's weird. Although it isn't first person, most of the narration happens inside Dan's head as he processes what others must be thinking about him. There isn't a lot of discussion of how he feels about himself, which I think is a deliberate choice.

I liked it. The writing is very good, the story was interesting and I liked that it dealt with a part of death that doesn't get a lot of play in fiction - the surreal period immediately afterwards, and the awkward dilemma of how to conduct oneself when one didn't have a straightforward relationship with the deceased. Dan leaves the funeral knowing far more about Denise than he did before, and the overwhelming loss of what her life could have been is bigger for him than the loss of her. The novel explores a lot of stuff like that without explicitly naming it; there is a lot to be drawn from it that depends on one's own experiences.

My one objection is that I found Dan almost too sympathetic; the narrative sometimes seems to forget the thoughtless and humiliating ordeal he put his wife and daughter through by having an affair. I didn't buy any of his justifications and had a hard time understanding his motivation for sleeping with Denise in the first place.

There's not a lot of Toronto-centric stuff going on, so I can't recommend it on a get-to-know-Toronto basis, but as a novel it's solid and an interesting read. Quick, but not light.

Four CN Towers out of five.

Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa

This is one of the books I was most excited to read for this project, as it is set in Portugal Village, which is where I live. I was disappointed, then, when the majority of the book didn't take place in Toronto at all - but still it gave it a certain heightened realism to finish reading it as I rode the streetcar home through streets of excited, flag-clad Portugese folks watched the Euro Cup. 

The story mentions a few Toronto landmarks - St. Michael's Hospital figures prominently - but mostly it is a Toronto story; it is set within the spirit of the city. The more Toronto literature I read, the more I find immigrant stories pervade the genre, and why not? This is a city of immigrants in a country of immigrants. So much of Toronto's struggle for a distinct identity is wrapped up in that delicate and uneasy tension of multiculturalism. 

The story follows three characters: first Manuel, a young Portugese man who longs to escape his stifling small town, his overbearing mother, and a very painful and tortured history with the Church. He takes a job on a fishing boat and finds a new home in Canada, first washing ashore in Newfoundland and eventually travelling across the whole country as a railroad worker, before settling in Toronto. Secondly, there is a brief interlude where we hear the story of Georgina, Manuel's wife, who married him despite the (literally) violent objections of his mother, who thought she could keep her favourite son in Portugal by having him marry a girl she chose. And then the latter part of the novel follows Antonio, Manuel's son, who grows up a delicate soul in Toronto, torn between the love and the resentment he feels for his father.

For a short book, there are a lot of heavy themes: sexual abuse, alcoholism, racism, domestic violence, and the constant intergenerational struggle between parents and children that is only exacerbated by the perceived need to adhere to cultural traditions in a new world. However, it is gentle and light at times, and the story is kept afloat by the determination and persistence of the characters surrounding Manuel - his strong and uncompromising wife and daughter, and his sensitive and intelligent son. The characters are compelling although they did sometimes delve into stereotypes (particularly Manuel's mother), but I imagine this is a function of the author attempting to create composites of people and types of people he has probably encountered in his own life in the Portugese community.

This is a story of real life and dreams and how they so often get in each other's way. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and it's beautifully and evocatively written; the story from which the title is derived left me with mental images I will not forget. It reads very quickly. I highly recommend it as a summer read - light and hopeful but with some substance, and a vague, bittersweet ending. 

Four CN Towers out of five.

The Glenwood Treasure by Kim Moritsugu

I have found that sometimes authors set their stories in Toronto but use a fictional neighbourhood (as for example Phyllis Brett Young did in The Torontonians), which can work very well, especially when it is surrounded by real Toronto landmarks and particularly that real Toronto vibe.

Unfortunately this novel, The Glenwood Treasure, did not really achieve this effect. The story is set in the fictional neighbourhood of Rose Park, an upscale east-end suburb-type area most reminiscent of Rosedale. Aside from the occasional mention of running errands "downtown", the rest of Toronto is never mentioned, and thus the feel of the city is left to be reflected in the author's depiction of Rose Park. Now, I haven't spent a lot of time in Rosedale or any of the affluent mini-suburbs that surround the downtown, so perhaps her depiction was entirely accurate, but it did not leave me with a feeling that this story took place in Toronto. It could have been anywhere, and actually probably should have been set in a smaller city or town; characters are constantly running into each other in this universe.

That was probably my biggest beef with this book, but I had others; it was not my favourite by any stretch. The story follows Blithe Morrison, a Rose Park-raised woman who has moved to California, and at the start of the novel has just been divorced and is coming back home. She moves into her parents' coach house for the summer and has plans to just putter around, but then a neighbour enlists her to help with research on a book about Rose Park, and Blithe starts to find a renewed interest in the Glenwood treasure - a legendary treasure buried over a century ago in Rose Park.

Blithe is surrounded by people from her old life - apparently she's the only person who ever left Rose Park - including her fussy, upper-class parents; Patrick the baker and love interest; Hannah, her childhood best friend; and eventually Noel, her brother, who also left Rose Park but comes back to torment her. The story is really about Blithe's relationship with Noel, her struggle with his effortless life and casual cruelty.

This is a strange novel. In some parts it seems like it is trying to be young adult fiction, but then the themes and content just seem a bit too explicit, or alternately too boring, for young adults. However it is a quick and simple read, and it's about buried treasure. So it's hard to say.

I thought it was well written in general, and it held my interest. However, there were a couple issues I had with it. First, I didn't find the protagonist very sympathetic; I found the main romantic plot to be almost completely lacking in chemistry; I thought the precocious eleven-year-old, Alexandra, to be sadly underused, particularly during the Nancy Drew-style treasure hunting; and I have to say, it is hard to care if your protagonist finds a half million dollar treasure when she seems to be doing ok, money-wise. Like really, I just didn't care whether or not she found it. Luckily that was not the main theme of the novel, but it really would have been harder to put down if she actually needed the money.

That was mainly what I found about this book: it was a quick and interesting read, but there was nothing that really held me to it or compelled me to keep picking it up. I would try Moritsugu again but I wouldn't recommend this particular novel.

Two CN Towers out of five

Where We Have to Go by Lauren Kirshner

No critic or reviewer can be objective; it stands to reason that every story and experience affects us differently depending on a multitude of factors that encompass who we are and where we come from. But I find some books are harder than others to give a fair review, or at least a review that will help people who are not me decide if they want to read it.

This book is one of those, because I identified so strongly with the protagonist, Lucy Bloom. She is two years older than me, and the story is her growing up in the nineties, dealing with body image issues, longing to be popular, aching to understand the adult world (and then, the more she understands it, longing to be rid of it). The friend that she makes halfway through the book, Erin, is like a composite of the three or four friends I had in junior high and high school who saved me by being so smart and strange. A lot of what happens to Lucy didn't happen to me, but she is such a perfect encapsulation of being a girl of that age, in that time, that it's like reading my own diary.

So that's why I'm not sure how much this review will apply to those who don't fall in the category of "girl born in the early eighties and raised in middle-class (to lower-middle class) Western society", but I imagine you will still like the book. It is absolutely wonderfully written, and as remarkable for the stories left out than those included.

Lucy is eleven when we first meet her. Her parents' relationship is falling apart; her father is a travel agent who has never been anywhere, and is a little too friendly with a woman at his AA meetings, and her mother is a thrift-store shopping, just a little too embarrassingly foreign woman with the classic "Jewish mom" concerns of getting Lucy fed and fixing her up with a nice boy. Lucy takes refuge in watching Alf reruns (remember Alf?) and nurtures compulsions that, if her parents paid attention, are clear early warning signs of the eating disorder she later develops.

The book follows Lucy through about eight years of her life. I loved how major stories that could have taken up the whole book - her parents' divorce, her eating disorder, her relationship with her grandfather - are presented as important, but just one piece each of a whole life. This is not a story about eating disorders or family relationships or death. It is a story about growing up as a girl. It is in some ways painfully 90s, but in other ways perfectly timeless.

I read that Kirshner was mentored by Margaret Atwood, which makes sense to me - this book is like the spiritual successor to Cat's Eye. However, while Kirshner touches on many of Atwood's pet themes - particularly women and girls, and how they act towards and around each other - she has her own very distinct style. The tone is not as dark as in Atwood's work; throughout the story, I always had hope for Lucy, a hope I never have for Atwood's characters. Kirshner is masterful with light humour that doesn't intrude on the momentum of even the sad parts of the story. She is absolutely a gifted writer; I would read more of her work in a heartbeat.

Four CN Towers out of five.

The Torontonians by Phyllis Brett Young

I did not get a conventional academic education in feminism/feminist theory, so I missed that stage of being immersed in second wave literature and theory. Despite this it took me a long time to get on board with intersectionality, privilege, etc. but regardless, the pop culture of/depicting that particular time of despair and ennui never really fascinated me.

You know what I'm talking about - the fifties/early sixties, white middle-class housewives living in the suburbs and yearning for something more. Think Revolutionary Road, Mad Men, etc. (and see how it still captivates us - or perhaps re-captivates us). This is what The Torontonians is about - a middle-class white housewife, Karen, who lives in the suburbs and begins to see her life as unimaginably dull, and begins to toy with the idea of suicide.

What kept me from being bored while reading The Torontonians was that it was not a tired re-tread of this pop culture trope; this book was first published in 1960, so it was pretty much written in real time. Young has captured perfectly the mood of her time, the fashion and feelings that costume designers and cinematographers are busting their butts now trying to replicate. I can't imagine that this book wasn't groundbreaking when it was published; I wonder how many women saw themselves in it, and how painful and liberating it must have been for them. At times I was bored and frustrated by it, but read in the context of the time it was written, it is earth-shattering.

The story takes place over a week of Karen's life, taking many detours into memories of her past. She lives in the fictional Toronto suburb of Rowanwood, and has just watched workmen lay the Chinese carpet she and her husband Rick have dreamed of owning for years. Suddenly, the end of the road has arrived - all of her dreams for herself have come true, and she realizes, slowly but surely, how petty and fragile those dreams really were. Now begins her "happily ever after", a prospect so dull and maddening, she considers suicide.

What struck me about the novel was that despite being rooted in a very particular time and place, it is in some ways a universal story about what it means to grow up, or to be a "grown up". All of Karen's friends live what we would think of as grown up lives, with houses, cars, children, responsibilities, etc. But they act like adolescents, with their obsessions with things, their sneaking around, their idiotic conduct. And Karen begins to realize how much she had romanticized things in her past, as well as the concept of having the house and living in Rowanwood. She is not an adult until she decides to live fully in reality.

I can't say too much about the story because it is one of those books that is about the journey; you need to follow everything through Karen's eyes and watch her grow. I loved how the author used Toronto as a blend of fact and fiction; Rowanwood is not real, nor are some of the street names mentioned, but some landmarks are - the Canada Life building, the art gallery, the university. As someone who is slightly familiar with the city, I found this led to the impression of a layer of fantasy covering the life of the inhabitants of Rowanwood - their slight separation from the reality of the life of the city. It was one of the most effective uses of Toronto as a setting that I've read so far.

There were times when I was a bit bored by the book, or I didn't want to pick it up because it was a bit depressing. But it was definitely, for me anyway, a worthwhile read and I would recommend it, for sure.

Three CN Towers out of five

Victim Impact by Mel Bradshaw

Not every author can walk the fine line between story-telling and point-making. There is always the risk of being too obvious, too preachy; or on the other hand, being too subtle. Bradshaw did a brilliant job in this novel. Holy shit.

The story is about a man, Ted, who teaches Criminology at the University of Toronto and receives some information about a biker gang from an overeager student; information that leads directly to the violent death of his wife, Karin, through a botched burglary attempt. The novel follows Ted and his father-in-law attempting to deal with the loss of Karin; the detectives investigating the case; the repercussions for the killer and his family; and Ted's attempt to get revenge.

On the night his wife is killed, Ted has stepped in for a colleague to moderate a panel on how to deal with violent crime. Much of the discussion revolves around the need for revenge vs. prevention/rehabilitation, and how our feelings change when someone we love becomes a victim of crime. It's a masterful plot device, having Ted hearing this discussion while his wife is in the process of being that victim. The story is about criminology, and about how we are limited by what we can intellectually argue from a point of logic and reason; without the emotional impact of being victimized ourselves, our opinions on crime can only stretch so far. Bradshaw demonstrates within Ted an impasse: he knows logically that his opinions on prevention and rehabilitation are correct in the grand scheme of things; but the pain of his loss can only drive a desire for revenge.

I suspect that the author's sympathies are with the "softer" take; he seems to sympathize with the social science perspective even while showing a great deal of empathy for his victim characters. The killer is also an interesting study - he is [spoiler alert] a young man from a well-adjusted suburban family, who seems to have a sociopathic streak (definite shades of We Need to Talk About Kevin). So the question also becomes: could this have been prevented, anyway? Would the lenient sentences that Ted himself advocates have been the best thing for the killer?

This book raises a lot of questions about the criminal justice system, and doesn't have any answers for any of them. Ted's final act of revenge is satisfying but ultimately troubling. There are no easy sympathies here. I was thoroughly challenged by this book; there was a point where I almost stopped reading it because it was so upsetting. But it's brilliantly put together, well written, and important.

The Toronto setting is a little underused, but the actual bulk of the story takes place in the much more suburban Mississauga, which I believe is important to the plot.

Overall I think this book was very good, but not super easy or chill to read. I highly recommend it, but don't expect a relaxing read for the cottage or whatever. It's a winter book for sure.

Four towers out of five.

Consolation by Michael Redhill

I know that a lot of my reviews have been very positive so far, and you're probably starting to think I'm one of those critics who just likes everything. Well, that is not true - especially about books. Ask any of my friends who have ever heard me talk about the Celestine Prophecy, and you will know what I think of bad writing. I also find that some books are quite well written and very good, but they're just not my thing (see Fables of Brunswick Avenue). But I think I've just been lucky so far with the books I've picked for this blog.

I am saying all this because I want you to know that when I tell you Consolation is among the top three most beautifully written books I've ever read, you need to know that it actually means something. I do know good writing when I come across it, and this book is pure poetry. (For the curious, the other two books in my top three would be A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod - ha! All three are Canadian).

Consolation deals with two stories: the first is the story of Jem Hallam, a chemist living in Toronto in the 1850s, and the story wrapped around it is of John Lewis, a young man in present-day Toronto, struggling with the death - and legacy - of his father-in-law, who committed suicide while suffering from ALS and believing that the construction site of a new arena was sitting on historically groundbreaking photographs of early Toronto.

This book is primarily about loss, about the past and how we relate to it, and about family. John is a man without a family, preparing to marry into one with a lot of baggage. As someone who is about to get married - and has been navigating the relating-to-a-long-term-love-interest's-family waters for nine years now - I related so much to both John and his fiancee, Bridget, as they both struggled to figure out John's place. In fact, there was a lot going on in John's life that struck a chord with me: the low-paying, labour-of-love job he picks up and how it contrasts with Bridget's career as a lawyer; the feeling of wandering through his twenties with the vague suspicion that adulthood should be here by now; the longing for acceptance and validation (a universal theme, for sure).

Hallam's story mirrors John's in his almost unconscious search for a family, and his unwillingness to let go of what he has lost. His Toronto is an unfriendly place, in climate and society. It was fascinating to read about the early days of the city, the makeup of a place consisting of so many people who had left their families behind in England. A city of lonely souls.

The whole book is gorgeously written, but there are some particularly beautiful scenes that I adored. The scene between Marianne and David (John's future in-laws) in the shower is probably the most compelling and emotional sex scene I have ever read. I cried and cried (on the streetcar!). There are a few conversations between John and his future mother-in-law that broke my heart; Redhill is clearly a writer who knows what it means to lose someone. His writing is bold in dealing with the uglier feelings that come with death - the who-loved-him-more, who-knew-him-better competitions that lurk beneath each conversation. Suicide always adds an extra layer to grief; whoever feels they had the greater claim to the deceased's love is inevitably burdened with the guilt of not intervening. We know it's not our fault but that's how it goes.

Toronto plays an interesting role in the book; the Toronto of the past is impatient to grow and thinks itself too young to merit keeping anything for historical interest, while present-day Toronto is also a place of progress-worship with no time to look for the past. Streets are mentioned, and landmarks, but it is definitely more about the feel of the city. Through the character of David, the author pleads with us to consider the past, to think about what life was really like and the people who have gone before. "The past really happened," he says to his daughter. It has to have, because what else would we leave behind?

I can't recommend this book highly enough. I adored it. Please read it if you ever have the chance; if you live in Toronto, there are 275 copies at the library. You've got no excuse.

Five CN Towers out of five.